On Wings of Eagles (36 page)

    "Their husbands and sons are unjustly imprisoned, so they gather here,

    wailing and crying to the guards to let the prisoners go. 91

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 223

    Simons said: "Well, I guess I feel the same about Paul and Bill as those

    women do about their men."

"Yes. I, too, am very concerned about Paul and Bill."

"But what are you doing about it?" Simons said.

    Rashid was taken aback. "I am doing everything I can to help my American

    friends," he said. He thought of the dogs and cats. One of his tasks at the

    moment was to care for all the pets left behind by EDS evacuees-including

    four dogs and twelve cats. Rashid had never had pets and did not know how

    to deal with large, aggressive dogs. Every time he went to the apartment

    where the dogs were stashed to feed them, he had to hire two or three men

    off the streets to help him restrain the animals. Twice now he had taken

    them all to the airport in cages, having heard that there was a flight out

    that would accept them; and both times the flight had been canceled. He

    thought of telling Simons about this, but somehow he knew that Simons would

    not be impressed.

    Simons was up to something, Rashid thought, and it was not a business

    matter. Simons struck him as an experienced man-you could see that just by

    looking at his face. Rashid did not believe in experience. He believed in

    fast education. Revolution, not evolution. He liked the inside track, short

    cuts, accelerated development, superchargers. Simons was different. He was

    a patient man, and Rashid--analyzing Simons's psychologyguessed that the

    patience came from a strong will. When he is ready, Rashid thought, he will

    let me know what he wants from

`~-,Do you know anything about the French Revolution?" Simons asked.

"A little."

    "This place reminds me of the Bastille-a symbol of oppression. 9'

It was a good comparison, Rashid thought.

    Simons went on: "The French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and let

    all the prisoners out."

    "I think the same will happen here. It's a possibility, at least."

    Simons nodded. "If it happens, someone ought to be here to take care of

    Paul and Bill."

"Yes." That will be me, Rashid thought.

    They stood together in Gasr Square, looking at the high walls and huge

    gates, and the wailing women in their black robes. Rashid recalled his

    principle: always do a little more than EDS

224 Ken FoUelt

asks of you. What if the mobs ignored Gasr Prison? Maybe he should make

sure they did not. The mob was nothing but people like Rashid-young,

discontented Iranian men who wanted to change their lives. He might not

only join the mob--he might lead it. He might lead an attack on the

prison. He, Rashid, might rescue Paul and Bill.

Nothing was impossible.

    2

Coburn did not know all that was going on in Simons's mind at this point. He

had not been in on Simons's conversations with Perot and Rashid, and Simons

did not volunteer much information. From what Coburn did know, the three

possibilities-4he trunkof-a-car trick, the house-arrest-and-snatch routine,

and the storming of the Bastille---seemed pretty vague. Furthermore, Simons

was doing nothing to make it happen, but appeared content to sit around the

Dvoranchik place discussing ever-more-detailed scenarios. Yet none of this

made Coburn uneasy. He was an optimist anyway; and he--like Ross

Perot-figured there was no point in second-guessing the world's greatest

rescue expert.

    While the dim possibilities were simmering, Simons concentrated on routes

    out of Iran, the problem Coburn thought of as

Cietting out of Dodge. -

    Coburn looked for ways of flying Paid and Bill out. He poked around

    warehouses at the airport, toying with the idea of shipping Paul and Bill

    as freight. He talked to people at each of the airlines, trying to develop

    contacts. He eventually had several meetings with the chief of security at

    Pan Am, telling turn everything except the names of Paul and Bill. They

    talked about getting the two fugitives on a scheduled flight wearing Pan Am

    cabin crew uniforms. The security chief wanted to help, but the affline's

    liability proved in the end to be an insuperable problem. Coburn then

    considered stealing a helicopter. He scouted a chopper base in the south of

    the city, and decided the theft was feasible. But, given the chaos of the

    hunian military, he suspected the aircraft were not being properly

    maintained and he knew they were short of spare parts. 'Men again, some of

    them might have contaminaW fuel.

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 225

    He reported all this to Simons. Simons was already uneasy about airports,

    and the snags uncovered by Coburn reinforced his prejudice. There were

    always police and military around airports; if something went wrong there

    was no escape. airports were designed to prevent people wandering where

    they should not go; at an airport you always had to put yourself in the

    hands of others. Furthermore, in that situation your worst enemy could be

    the people escaping: they needed to be very cool. Coburn thought Paul and

    Bill had the nerves to go through something like that, but there was no

    point telling Simons so: Simons always. had to make his own assessment of

    a man's character, and he had never met Paul or Bill.

So in the end the team focused on getting out by road.

There were six ways.

    To the north was the USSR, not a hospitable country. To the east were

    Afghanistan, equally inhospitable, and Pakistan, whose border was too far

    away-almost a thousand miles, mostly across desert. To the south was the

    Persian Gulf, with friendly Kuwait just fifty or a hundred miles across the

    water. That was Promising. To the west was unfriendly Iraq; to the

    northwest, friendly Turkey.

Kuwait and Turkey were the destinations they favored.

    Simons asked Coburn to have a trustworthy Iranian employee drive south all

    the way to the Persian Gulf, to firid out whether the road was passable and

    the countryside Peaceful. Coburn asked the cycle man, so called because he

    zipped around Tehran on a motorcycle. A trainee systems engineer like

    Rashid, the Cycle Man was about twenty-five, short, and street-smart. He

    had learned English at school in California, and could talk with any

    regional American accent--southem, Puerto Rican, anything. EDs had hired

    him despite his lack of a college degree because he scored remarkably high

    marks on aptitude tests. When EDS's Iranian employees had joined the

    general strike, and Paul and Coburn had called a mass meeting to discuss it

    with them, the Cycle Man had astonished everyone by speaking out vehemently

    against his colleagues and in favor of the management. He made no secret of

    his pro-American feelings, yet Coburn was quite me the Cycle Man was

    involved with the revolutionaries. One day he had asked Keane Taylor for a

    car. Taylor had given him one. The next day he asked for mother. Taylor

    obliged. The Cycle Man always used his motorcycle anyway: Taylor and Coburn

    were pretty sure the cars were for the revolutionaries.

226 Ken FoIku

They did not care: it was more important that the Cycle Man become obligated

to diem.

    So, in return for past favors, the Cycle Man drove to the Persian Gulf.

    He came back a few days later and reported that anything was possible if

    you had enough money. You could get to the Gulf and you could buy or rent

    a boat.

    He had no idea what would happen when you disembarked in Kuwait.

That question was answered by Glenn Jackson.

As well as being a hunter and a Baptist, Glenn Jackson was a Rocket Man. His

combination of a first-class mathematical brain and the ability to stay calm

under stress had got him into Mission Control at NASA's Manned Spacecraft

Center in Houston as a flight controller. His job had been to design and

operate the computer programs that calculated trajectories for in-flight

maneuvering.

    Jackson's unflappability had been severely tested on Christmas Day 1968,

    during the last mission he worked on, the lunar flyby. When the spacecraft

    came out from behind the moon, astronaut Jim Lovell had read down the list

    of numbers, called residuals, which told Jackson how close the craft was to

    its planned course. Jackson had got a ftight: The numbers were way outside

    the acceptable limits of error. Jackson asked CAPCOM to have the astronaut

    read them down again, to double-check. Then he told the flight director

    that if those numbers were correct, the three astronauts were as good as

    dead: there was not enough fuel to correct such a huge divergence.

    Jackson asked for Lovell to read the numbers a third time, extra carefully.

    They were the same. Then Lovell said: "Oh, wait a minute, I'm reading these

    wrong . . . "

    When the real numbers came through, it turned out that the maneuver had

    been almost perfect.

All that was a long way from busting into a prison.

    Still, it was beginning to look like Jackson would never get the chance to

    perpetrate a jailbreak. He had been cooling his heels in Pans for a week

    when he got instructions from Simons, via Dallas, to go to Kuwait.

    He flew to Kuwait and moved into Bob Young's house. Young had gone to

    Tehran to help the negotiating team, and his wife, Kris, and her new baby

    were in the States on vacation.

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 227

Jackson told Malloy Jones, who was Acting Country Manager in Young's

absence, that he had come to help with the preliminary study EDS was doing

for Kuwait's central bank. He did a little work for the benefit of his cover

story, then started looking around.

    He spent some time at the airport, watching the immigration officers. They

    were being very tough, he soon learned. Hundreds of Iranians without

    passports were flying into Kuwait: they were being handcuffed and put on

    the next flight back. Jackson concluded that Paul and Bill could not

    possibly fly into Kuwait.

    Assuming they could get in by boat, would they later be allowed to kave

    without passports? Jackson went to see the American Consul, saying that one

    of his children seemed to have lost a passport, and asking what was the

    procedure for replacing it. In the course of a long and rambling discussion

    the Consul revealed that the Kuwaitis had a way of checking, when they

    issued an exit visa, whether the person had entered the country legally.

    That was a problem, but perhaps not an insoluble one: once inside Kuwait,

    Paul and Bill would be safe from Dadgar, and surely the U.S. Embassy would

    then give them back their passports. The main question was: assuming the

    fugitives could reach the south of Iran and embark on a small boat, would

    they be able to land unnoticed in Kuwait? Jackson traveled the sixtymile

    length of the Kuwait coast, from the Iraqi border in the north to the

    Saudi-Arabian border in the south. He spent many hours on the beaches,

    collecting seashells in winter. Normally, he had been told, coastal patrols

    were very light. But the exodus from Iran had changed everything. There

    were thousands of Iranians who wanted to leave the country almost as badly

    as Paul and Bill did; and those Iranians, like Simons, could look at a map

    and see the Persian Gulf to the south with friendly Kuwait just across the

    water. The Kuwait Coast Guard was wise to all this. Everywhere Jackson

    looked, he saw, out at sea, at least one patrol boat; and they appeared to

    be stopping all small craft.

    The prognosis was gloomy. Jackson called Merv Stauffer in Dallas and

    reported that the Kuwait exit was a no-no.

That left Turkey.

    Simons had favored Turkey all along. It involved a shorter drive than

    Kuwait. Furthermore, Simons knew Turkey. He had served there in the Mes as

    part of the American military aid

228 Ken FoUeu

program, training the Turkish Army. He even spoke a little of the language.

So he sent Ralph Boulware to Istanbul.

Ralph Boulware grew up in bars. His father, Benjamin Russell Boulware, was

a tough and independent black man who had a series of small businesses: a

grocery store, real-estate rentals, bootlegging, but mostly bars. Ben

Boulware's theory of childraising was that if he knew where they were, he

knew what they were doing, so he kept his boys mostly within his sight,

which meant mostly in the bar. It was not much of a childhood, and it left

Ralph feeling that he had been an adult all Ins fife.

    He had realized he was different from other boys Ins age when he went to